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Margaret Galvan

Assistant Professor

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Margaret Galvan’s archivally-informed research explores how visual culture operates within the print media of feminist and queer social movements of the 1970s-1990s. Her first book, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s (2023) is out now from University of Minnesota Press. In Visible Archives examines how women created visual art in feminist and gay and lesbian activist circles to theorize their embodied sexuality and build supportive communities, analyzing both their contemporary reception as well as the legacies of these ephemeral artworks as they migrated into archives. In 2021-2022, she was in residence at the Stanford Humanities Center as the Distinguished Junior External Fellow researching a second book about how LGBTQ cartoonists in the 1980s-90s innovated comics through grassroots formats.

Her grant-funded archival research spans over a dozen archives where she analyzes comics, captioned photographs, drawings, transparencies, advertisements, and other image-text media produced by women. Her published work can be found in journals like American Literature, Archive Journal, Australian Feminist Studies, iNKS, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly. She serves on the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF), and she is affiliate faculty of the Department of Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses that examine feminisms, queer theory, etc. through comics, zines, and other visual media. In these courses, students create public digital scholarship through multimodal research projects.

Professor Galvan’s CV

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